


shatter my dream (with the aid of reality)

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [204]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Character Study, Colonialism, Creep Factor is at 1000, Gen, I'm Done Tagging Now, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Opium, Other, Racism, Read at Your Own Risk, The premise is: Morgoth is disappointed that Angband Arc is over and gets super high, gross gross gross, title from Hugo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:34:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23291776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Who is he? Pater noster, he whispers to himself, of himself.
Relationships: Arien & Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor, Lúthien Tinúviel & Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor, Maedhros | Maitimo & Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor, Manwë Súlimo & Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor, Morgoth Bauglir | Melkor & Sauron | Mairon
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [204]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 9
Kudos: 19





	shatter my dream (with the aid of reality)

_“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”_ – Oscar Wilde

On a day not so far from the present, this casket of rock-hewn dreams will open up its mouth to emit the uneasy cry of a strained and laboring earth, and, so opened, the whole will heave, gnash, and plummet to ruin. There is, perhaps, a chord of such foreboding knowledge, plucked out from among the strings of plot and intellect. Insofar as that chord finds its way into the _mind_ , it is troubling.

So: he retires to his rooms.

Who is _he_? _Pater noster_ , he whispers to himself, of himself. He knows _himself_ intimately, for it is his own company that he has kept for long and lonely years, forced by superiority, by law, by religion. Whether men pressed the flesh of his long, shapely hands to originate business, or lithe young figures sent _his_ flesh quivering with a keen comprehension of their confused concupiscence, he remained alone in both thoughts and ventures.

Art, science, philosophy. These were his to know, and he knew also the way that torture could make a Godhead of that trinity. Could build an altar of a young body, and sacrifice the young soul over it, in burnt or unburnt offering. 

Imagine it! A knife spoiling clean flesh by means of a mapped scarlet line; the sublime anguish of pain perfecting voice and form; and, thereafter, death and ruin giving praise.

Imagine it, and weep.

His rooms—

There is the conservatory (which you know), awash in curios and perfumed by poison and vine. Crawling things; wriggling interests. It is a cold study, in a coal-heated space, and it cannot serve him now.

There is the war-room (which you also know), from which the bony crest of California is visible, such that the banners of his schemes may march like Hannibal’s elephants, along snowed-over mountain ribs. If some must perish on the way, those that survive will wreak their vengeance all the more doughtily on the ant-like fools who swarm the brown-bodied valleys below.

There is the dining hall (crumbling), and lastly, above the infirmary where old Père Clement used to teach cripples to walk again despite their sins and blemishes, there lies his bedchamber. He cares not for the storerooms and the suffering supports that fill the spaces between.

The bedchamber’s walls have been boarded, by force, so as to appear civilized. They have also been papered, but the paper buckles under rocky strain. This is a pity. The paper came from the misty, scented Orient. It is silk-screened in patterns of shadowy bamboo, dyed wine-dark. It was bundled and wrapped in oilcloth before being transported here by wagon. A fortune was paid for it, though not, of course, by him.

The four-poster bed is massive, and was carried west in many pieces. Only silk and velvet will do to swaddle his limbs, for his skin chafes beneath the heavy wool he wears always, by day, over his linen. Try as he may to strengthen the muscles of his arms and legs, they are covered in a soft layer of inexorably fatty tissue, the sort that is akin in texture to worm-bodies or the palate of the mouth. _This_ knowledge gives him no joy, and indeed, has given him cause for anger, but if the thought is redirected (and it is), then that outward film becomes no more than the albumen of an egg. The yolk beneath is formed of rich and powerful meat.

The soul beneath _that_ — But hold. Hold, a little, the blinking space of a moment, blown like a soap-bubble.

Down among the velvet, past the knobbed skullcaps of his knees, where his feet rise white and unyielding in the candled gloom—like gravestones—or no, no! The twin sails of a man-o’-war—

His hand, strong and undressed of the deceit of _too much flesh_ , grasps for the slim-stemmed pipe again.

On a day not so far from the present, the bird-brother will open its beak, but not to cough gold coins as a trained parrot should (but never does). Manwe will find him out, and Manwe will cease to keep him in funds, accordingly. The banks will shut _their_ mouths, Washington shall call alarm.

He should write a letter to Manwe, and, if he is to _beg_ , he should also tell it of its eagle face and its clawing child-hands.

He is thinking of eagles again.

(It has been two days. His right hand bloats, a steamed pudding of bruises.)

They carved the gods in marble, cold yet supple lineaments beneath the sweating palms of worshipers. He has traveled to Greece, to Rome. He has hung a god from his own sky, then made him Prometheus, pecking out bits of him until no smooth marble remained.

Who is an eagle now?

He rouses himself from the great, swimming bed when the moon climbs high. The night before, he drank some of the stuff by means of its sweet black water, and while he lapped, humming to himself, he ran his hands over the tiger-skin rug beside the bed.

He commissioned it in India. _Kill me the finest of its kind_ , he said, but afterwards, he wished he had not made the command so plain. Better to be an eternal ambiguity, better to imagine the tiger living without its skin, naked and indebted, unable to be its own creature ever again.

This cannot be. The world—cannot—be—what he wants it to be.

The pipe is preferable to the poppy-draught. It draws a little of that enigmatic soul out of the body, festooning the air with the sort of dreams that no gravity, not even a mountain, falling, can bury. Ah, this will tease some artistry out of him! This will coax some—

Not regret. Regret and remorse are very different. One is for the weak and one is for the benevolent god.

Gods act in anger, and bless what is left with remorse.

 _If I am given you again_ , he says to the red-haired, red-eyed ghost, _I will keep you safe._

He drags himself away from the caressing suffocation of soiled velvet, and when he strikes the floor, head-and-shoulder-first, he smiles and smiles, wondering if hard stone was so cruel to—

His pipe calls to him, through the rain-drenched air. There is rain, these nights, in his chambers. It is the color of frilled poppies. It is not really rain at all.

_Sir—it is urgent—_

He hefts the lion in his hand, opens its mouth. It roars out a bullet.

No more voices come.

If his feet are the warships, then the bones of his right hand are little fishing barks, sailing along canals that have had their clay linings shattered by insolence. All the blood is coming out the wrong way, and that is the fault of the red-haired ghost.

_We are alike. Bearing each other’s sins._

Desire is the apple and the serpent both. A god must be more than desire. But here are a dozen years and more, opening a door before an ugly, broad-faced woman whose eyes are muddy hazel rather than quicksilver—

And that is the beginning of lust: disappointment.

When a god is disappointed, the whole world changes.

(He doesn’t think he is only a god.)

His cheek (smooth, elegant, elongated) is pressed against the tiger’s ruddy stripes. He pushes himself up on the hand that the ghost (the boy) did not harm. It is a delicate business, what with the pipe and poppy calling, but there are other sirens.

A god has not… _needs_. A god has a will, and a man has a need, and for the serpent to keep from devouring its own tail in place of the apple…well. He has had to use one for the other, facing both directions, gatekeeping fate. Now he will do what the past could not: make himself another angel.

There are angels in the halls made by other men’s hands, angels with swan necks and hagiographical gazes, as if their painters did not trust them to speak true.

He is glad, all told, that he left the boy his eyes.

More or less—they did not escape the blows they had earned, just as the traitorous hand could never be freed from its writ of judgment. But he did not pluck them out…

_—a lovely name for a lovely girl, if somewhat cold for your warm coloring, my dear! Still, there is the poetry of it: even the golden sun, after all, is a Star_ —

He had told her that, his eyes on her pert lips and then rising, rising, to those flashing black depths. He had imagined her freed of her world and all of her protections, from father to furbelows, free of everything and wholly his.

She had denied him, and he had thought, _the sun is our only star, and thus one eye alone shall you be left, Estrela_. His whole mind went black with the same rage that flooded through him when they dragged that foolish redheaded brat before him for the last time, that brat who dared to be insensible again in his arms as if he still had the _right_ —

They were alike, Maedhros-son-of-Feanor, and Estrela the mapmaker’s daughter. They were beautiful and arrogant and he had taken the god-debt out of their cringing skin.

He opens the doors of the _tansu_ chest, and fetches canvas instead of skin, paint instead of blood, and the little jars that hold eye and tooth preserved.

_All I have left of you._

Crimson paint. Amber. Black.

A beginning.

Mairon-Annatar, who was once a lonely boy with hungry red hands and a white face simply _filled_ with teeth, chose the place for the boy’s hanging. Each night, Mairon-Annatar does what he chooses, and reports back.

He is almost too angry, still, to forgive. To listen. In the mossy darkness, means to hear that the heart beats painfully. Full of blood, is the apple. Full of blood, is all betrayal—all desire.

No forgiveness, then, for the son of Feanor, with his lecherous beauty and his leprous soul. Mercy does not look like absolution, but it does look like the clean line of cheek and chin.

_Maitimo, I give you back to us._

It is more than he did for Estrela.

When Mairon-Annator comes tonight, perhaps craving the pipe with animal curiosity rather than aspiration, rather than _hope_ …

_We shall show him, you and I, what a favorite you would have been. How I would have dressed you, and led you! If you only had heeded me…_

_As would a son._

_As would a thing created._

Mairon-Annatar, on his hands and knees, when the drug takes him, answers this:

_He will be dead in a few more nights. I keep the body, master?_

_Yes, yes._ He is impatient. He has a canvas and a heavy—nay, a weightless dream to realize. He has tomorrow and tomorrow, of the fated poppy. _Do what you will._

So: the chin and cheek are as smooth as they were when he fastened the pin of a dart beneath the flickering eye. Terror was still mingled with strength, then, though the hands were bound high above. Muscles twitched over harp-strung ribs. A trammeled heartbeat beat beneath, caged somehow more than either of its fathers’ ever did.

Fathers, old and new. It had been tempting to push the dart needle-deep, for the sake of the fathers. Tempting, but too permanent—eyes were eyes.

Estrela had not known that, until he taught her the only lesson she ever earned. 

But Estrela is a dead grey husk of an interest, while the boy is a shipwreck of uncommon tragedy. Like the burnished figureheads on barks seeking safe harbour, that pale body rose, chained to a mast by need alone. It would not endure stillness, docility.

Yes, the Furies themselves would have a word with this boy. Ancient Hades would pity the history of those bones.

But he is not Hades. The underworld is not enough for him. The boy was not enough for him. Even then, when the dart pressed and drew back, the body had already been altered. Dark fleas of blood were easily smeared away; bruises beneath eyes and at the corner of lips could be worn as shadows only, thanks to the secrets of paint. The lips themselves, however, had been all wrong; bitten and worried by weeks of tormented sleep.

Weeks—or months—

Thuringwethil, who had not a scrap of art about her, and who, at present, rots— _she_ had written of the taste of that mouth almost as floridly as she had written of the taste of that life.

Lips, then, would bloom full in this fresh self; bright with blood, but not bleeding.

The Greeks…they offer nothing. The Orient is the road to glory. Thingol’s daughter is the glory at the end of his road. Symmetry is the apple, by which means the serpent gives itself a purpose. He thinks of Thingol’s daughter sometimes, when the remorse is as dark as the velvet.

The thought is picked out of the dimples of his fleshly brain in the same way that the remnants of a walnut are hooked tenderly from its shell.

A walnut is the best analogue to the brain, after all. Its skull—all skulls—may be split by gleeful pincers. Metal bound about the brow is both a death sentence and a right belonging to kings. It is all a matter of dimension.

(A smoke ring—dimension—)

If he had the boy to crown again, he would not permit a jealous blade to shear all that sumptuous copper almost to naught. He will keep, now, the fullness of those ruddy curls. At the time, it had been a farce in three parts: the set jaw, the tearful eyes, the revealed curve of the scalp.

Of course, there was _philosophy_ , too, boring like a weevil into the pleasure of such elements. A little shame, a little petty loss, was as a daub of white amid rich earth-tones. It lit up that most detestable and necessary weevil: truth. One truth, and a comfortable one: the boy blushed easily. The loss of anything—the hair tumbling down his neck or the shirt clinging to his shoulders—hurt him.

The loss of a tooth hurt him. The whip applied to his shoulders hurt him, and _that_ had never even come from a father’s hand!

 _And you hurt me_. _You hurt me, time and again, and never once did you beg my forgiveness. Not until I paupered your form._ The brush moves swiftly, a caress and a warning. Red, red, red. Each tendrilled lock falls unbroken, as if they all still dance about ears and throat.

He wonders what good it would have done, to have taken his ears. He almost took ears from the mapmaker’s daughter, because she would not _listen_.

On the subject, and between two smoke-rings: that barometer cost a pretty penny. Not his, of course. Never his. But Manwe would miss its pennies sooner or later, and had been especially chary of them in those days.

No one understood the nature of gifts.

Not in the degenerate days of youth.

He has been burdened with many young lives. He sees that for the gift it is.

_You wake in a sea of vitreous yellow. The stench; the fickle light streaming in through the opened door. You rise—you plummet. Your hand seizes the striped tiger pelt beneath you; it is spongy, sodden, vile._

_The pipe is snapped in two. A grief, a loss!_

_The door is open._

At the threshold are two bodies. One is dead, because he bedecked the wall opposite with scraps of skull and smears of soft brain. One is living, and cringing.

It is Mairon-Annatar, and he has half a face remaining.

On the wall behind the door behind the mountain-god is the portrait of a smooth marble body, a copper crown, and an unblemished countenance. Yet, light shows: there is no hagiographical gaze that can halo a whore.

Eyes are eyes. The boy was a thing created, but not by him.

(He boils the copper glove without opening it. After, he cracks it like a lobster, and plucks the bones out of their baseborn sea of flesh.)

What is a god, without worshipers? What is the sun, without another eye to gaze upon it?

(He discards the mass of flesh, the twisted metal. They belonged to Mairon-Annatar, and the beam and mote have been laid to rest in the failure of a blind man.)

Oh, to stand corrupted in filth the fault of another! Oh, to ascend to the gentle ecstasies of a flowered abode, only to wake in the palm of betrayal, bored through by the weevil of truth! Oh, to be a serpent, and yet to be ruled by hands!

(He slashes the canvas to bits, and burns the whole.)

On a day not so far from the present, this casket of rock-hewn dreams—


End file.
